"New Beat"

There were moments on Chaz Bundick's debut album as Toro Y Moi that hinted at a desire to push his work into buoyant pop-soul territory. But that record is starting to look like a mere preliminary sketch for what's coming next, as demonstrated by the positively contagious groove of "New Beat", which is a leaner, tighter, more fully focused expression of Bundick's talent. The musical backing draws a neat line back to the squelched-out ARP synth experiments of Stevie Wonder's Innervisions, providing a perfect boost to the handclap-driven beat and "ah-ah" vocal loop that sounds like it's been pulled from Laurie Anderson's "O Superman". There's a transformative effect at work here that's similar to the one Beck underwent when he was mining Prince-style odd funk circa Midnite Vultures, with the vocals sounding supremely confident and all the loose ends of the Toro sound tied up and contorted into a mutated take on disco.